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Saddam Mian is ecstatic. The 24-year-old resident of Bangladeshi enclave Poatur Kuthi in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal has been glued to the TV since morning. As the Constitution (119th Amendment) Bill 2013 on Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) between India and Bangladesh was cleared in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, Saddam announced, on Facebook, freedom from captivity.
He is not alone. It is celebration time for over 51,000 state-less people in 162 enclaves on either side of the international border. This includes 37,000 living in 101 Indian enclaves in three Bangladeshi districts (Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari and Kurigram) bordering Cooch Behar, and 14,000 in 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in Cooch Behar in India.
Since the Partition in 1947, they have been living in landlocked enclaves — each a few hundred acres — located in foreign territories. As a result they were left unattended by either country, but no more.
It’s now a mere formality for the Lok Sabha to clear the Bill, allowing the Modi government to redraw the land boundary declaring Poaturkuthi and 50 other Bangladeshi enclaves as an integral part of India, as was agreed in a 1974 bilateral accord.
Bangladeshi has already approved a similar amendment on Indian enclaves. As part of the land swap deal, enclave residents will be offered a choice to switch their nationality.
According to a survey by the Bharat Bangladesh Enclave Exchange Coordination Committee (BBEECC), in 2013, a total of 743 people out of 37,000 in Indian enclaves in Bangladesh were keen to migrate to India. None from the Bangladeshi enclaves wanted to leave India. The BBEECC has been demanding an end to this human tragedy for two decades. The organisation has already donated 15 acres of land (inside the enclaves) to district authorities to help rehabilitate families migrating from enclaves in Bangladesh.
In a letter to the PM last month, the organisation promised to offer another 84 acres land free of cost for such rehabilitation. It also stocked food provisions adequate to support 300 families for six months.
Stand by commitment“We stand by our commitment to help facilitate the West Bengal and India government to implement the land boundary agreement,” Diptiman Sengupta, Chief Coordinator of BBEECC, told BusinessLine from Dinhata in Cooch Behar.
Enclaves apart, the constitutional amendment will help remove the existence of adversely possessed land (APL). Located on the international border along West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, APLs are small patches of land controlled by either country in deviation from the Radcliffe line.
Non-implementation of the LBA has always been a sore point in India’s ties with Bangladesh.
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